Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, but misinformation will continue to win

The election is over, but the misinformation age is just beginning.

While President Donald Trump, who has been a major disseminator of falsehoods, lost the election to Democratic challenger Joe Biden, the allure of conspiracy theories, misleading videos and digital lies will endure.

Experts say the propagators of misinformation – ranging from nefarious foreign actors like Russia to American politicians to ordinary folks who have no idea they’re sharing falsehoods – will continue to flourish even as mainstream social media companies take a more aggressive stance against them.

“Misinformation will remain a potent force in American politics,” said Josh Pasek, a University of Michigan professor and expert on misinformation and political communication.

One key reason: With Trump out of power, his legion of supporters will be energized to circulate posts, memes and videos that undermine Biden, misinformation experts say. Still others will fall into the basic human trap of sharing, posting or commenting on misleading content that they have no idea is off base.

“The forces that have made President Trump’s misinformation such an effective strategy for him won’t go away,” said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist who has studied the issue. “The same incentives will exist for politicians, cable news networks and partisan websites to create misinformation. If anything, they’ll have a more receptive audience because negative information about a Biden administration will be even more appealing.”

Misinformation flourishes:How QAnon and other dark forces are radicalizing Americans

Leaving Twitter and Facebook:Parler, MeWe, Gab gain momentum as conservative social media alternatives

There are already signs of a new chapter beginning with the rise of conservative social media alternatives such as Parler, MeWe and Gab, which largely promote that they won’t take down accounts or posts that spread misinformation. Those services say they have gained millions of followers since the election because Americans are fed up with the increasingly active moderation policies of Facebook and Twitter, in particular. They have become a major source of false attacks on the validity of the election results – which Trump has widely promoted.

But they have also become a haven for the spread of dark conspiracy theories such as the extremist ideology known as QAnon, whose followers believe in the debunked theory that an evil cabal of Democrats is running a secret child-sex-trafficking ring. QAnon adherents, who have held Trump as a savior figure anointed to uproot the cabal, are not likely to fade away simply because the Oval Office has changed occupants.

“Historically, conspiracy theories have thrived amid people who are out of power, so you could imagine QAnon gaining greater potency with Trump out of office,” Nyhan said. “I don’t know how they’ll adapt, but the movement, such as it is, has proven to be quite flexible in how it contorts itself to events.”

While Trump, who has refused to denounce QAnon, will no longer be president, Congress now has at least one member who has been described as a supporter of the radicalized theory: Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won her race in Georgia.

QAnon will draw oxygen from that momentum, experts said.

“It will evolve, it will mutate and it will be weaponized and exploited,” said Fil Menczer, director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University Bloomington and an expert on the spread of misinformation

To be sure, the major social media platforms have announced crackdowns on QAnon in recent months, including Facebook and Google’s YouTube, which have banned QAnon content from their platforms.

Facebook and Twitter have also recently begun more regularly placing warning labels on Trump’s posts and taking down groups or accounts that make false claims, such as a Facebook group that baselessly claimed the election was being stolen.

But Menczer said misinformation will continue to capitalize on social media’s capacity for echo chambers. And it will only get worse if people begin to choose their social media services based on their political identity, he said.

“The risk, if that happens, is further segregation into homogeneous echo chambers where alternative facts are unchallenged, conspiracies can fester, exposure to corrections is suppressed and a common reality becomes more elusive,” Menczer said.

Big tech, journalists under pressure

That said, the mainstream social media companies remain under significant pressure from both sides of the political aisle – from Republicans who have accused them of anti-conservative biases and from Democrats who have accused them of enabling misinformation. Both sides have lambasted the tech giants for allegedly violating antitrust regulations. Trump’s Justice Department recently sued Google, accusing it of anti-competitive violations.

One thing the social media companies will have to address is how to deal with Trump’s posts once he’s out of office. On Twitter, the president has been especially prolific, reaching an audience of more than 88 million followers with constant posts and retweets, including some that Twitter has flagged or blocked from circulating because of false or misleading claims.

“That will continue to be his megaphone,” Menczer said.

The news media will also face a question of how much attention they’ll pay to Trump’s tweets once he’s out of office. Journalists have come under scrutiny for giving Trump’s misleading or false tweets too much publicity. 

“The problem certainly won’t go away, and the weaknesses that Trump has revealed in our political system are very much there,” Nyhan said.

Nyhan made the case that the media should refrain from magnifying Trump’s tweets once he has left Washington.

“Even now while he’s in office there are serious questions about whether the media should be amplifying Trump’s false statements,” Nyhan said. “I think that question becomes clearer when he is out of office. Absent compelling reasons to the contrary, Donald Trump making false statements on Twitter (after he’s left office) is not a news event, and the media should try to refrain from amplifying it whenever they can.”

New threats emerge

While Trump’s tweets may soon be a less influential source of misinformation, there are new threats on the horizon, such as the emergence of “deepfakes,” which are fabricated video or audio that purposely mislead people. Experts say deepfakes are on their way in the coming years, threatening to fool people into thinking that others said or did things they never said or did.

But “cheap fakes” are a bigger concern for now, said Katy Byron, manager of journalism nonprofit The Poynter Institute’s MediaWise, a fact-check training group.

“Cheap fakes” are videos or photos that are crudely edited to mislead and easier to generate with a simple set of skills and technology. Shortly before the election, for example, an edited video circulated on social media showing Biden appear to forget what state he was in. In reality, Biden had correctly referred to his location.

“Low-quality fakes produced at volume quickly seem to be more likely to propagate than high-quality deep fakes that require technical expertise,” Nyhan said. “Cheap fakes are perfectly sufficient for generating the kind of rumors that people are trying to spread.”

Recent actions by Facebook, Twitter and others to crack down on misinformation is a welcome development, said Tim Kendall, a former Pinterest and Facebook executive. But he is skeptical it will make a big difference.

Kendall, who is CEO of Moment, an app that helps users limit their phone usage, said misinformation will flourish because the fundamental business model of social media is predicated in grabbing people’s attention and pursuing aggressive growth. Without sensational content to keep users coming back, social media giants would not be able to satisfy their investors, he said.

“They’re starting to be aggressive, but it’s kind of like saying we’re going to fight a forest fire after it’s burned 100,000 acres,” Kendall said.

Follow USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey on Twitter @NathanBomey.

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